Revitalized Retrospectives

Leading effective Retrospectives is one of the most critical skills an Agile Facilitator can have. However, repeating the same Retrospective format every time can lead to stale ideas, unengaged participants, and bored facilitators. Changing up the Retro format can help keep your facilitation skills sharp and your team members interested and engaged. This discussion will allow attendees to learn about and experiment with new and exciting formats that will help revitalize your Retros.

Outline/Structure of the Talk

Begin with explanation about how changing up the format keeps your skills sharp.

Explain that under the surface it's about brainstorming to gather ideas, narrow the topic, and land on actions towards improvement. The retro ideas we'll present are all templates to achieve that purpose.

Briefly discuss some basic retros (I like/I wish/I wonder, what went well/what didn't, +/-/delta, etc) as examples of stale formats and why this can make your retros less effective.

We will then travel around the room explaining a number of non-traditional retro activities that will help keep participants engaged. These ideas will be set up on walls or tables around the room. Examples include board games and mini art projects.

Finally we’ll have a couple stations set up for attendees to try out some of the new ideas we’ve discussed

Learning Outcome

New Retro ideas to add to the bag of skills

Sharpened facilitation skills

Ability to engage a variety of Agile teams with creative Retrospectives

It’s okay (and encouraged!) to experiment with different Retrospective formats

Target Audience

Retrospective Facilitators, Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters

Prerequisites for Attendees

Attendees should have a basic understanding of the goals of a Retrospective.

Links

This is not an exact duplicate of what we intend to speak about, but there is some overlap in the ideas: https://communities.ca.com/videos/7242-replay-put-the-shine-back-into-lackluster-retrospectives-september-19-2018

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Jeff Ditillo / Barry Kardon - Agile for Lean Startups

schedule 4 months ago

Sold Out!

60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Lean startups need to build, measure, and learn. This involves building small slices of their product, getting it out to customers quickly, getting feedback on what they’ve built, and learning from that in order to make critical product decisions quickly.

How does this look to the software team developing this product? How can they effectively execute in these cycles?

Agile practices can provide a solid framework for a Lean startup. Agile incremental development cycles that include recurring planning and Retrospectives are a great way to execute on the validated learning and innovation that Lean startups need. Coupling the typical Sprint cadences with monthly planning amongst the entire organization will ensure that the team is informed and focused.